


speak in tongues

by SpineAndSpite



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Language Barrier, M/M, Politics, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 19:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15226005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpineAndSpite/pseuds/SpineAndSpite
Summary: The last time Yuri went sightseeing with Otabek it had been the middle of winter, and he only had breath to contemplate the speed of the bike and the warmth of Otabek through his jacket. A crowded bus is a far cry, but he still has the same feeling of displacement--of not knowing what will happen next.(Yuri and Otabek take a trip to Italy and complications arise)





	speak in tongues

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend who wanted to see Yuri and Otabek hash out some politics between them.

The cold suits Yuri. 

He doesn’t often say it aloud; the responses are boring and obvious. Of course the cold suits him--he spent half his childhood in a cottage on the Russian tundra with nothing but a fireplace and a creaky radiator, and the rest on an ice rink. When people think _Yuri Plisetsky_ , they think _cold_. Well, after they think _youngest ever winner of the Grand Prix_. 

The cold makes him more awake, more himself. Also he looks great in scarves. There’s that. He likes the cold. So when Otabek Altin asks him to spend June with him on the Mediterranean coast and Yuri says yes at once, it holds a certain weight. 

The trip planning mostly consists of Otabek sending him pictures of rolling green hills dotted with goats, grape trellises baking in the Tuscan sun, and Etruscan ruins that just look like piles of rocks to Yuri. He mostly responds with a thumbs up emoji. He shops for summer clothes online. Mia gives him a hard time over the leopard print, and Yuri gives her the finger. He shows growing maturity and actually tells Yakov he’s leaving this time--in the middle of the night via text. He doesn’t want to give him the chance to say no. Otabek already bought the tickets. 

Yuri has experienced hot summers before. He’s spent time in China and southern California, but he has never experienced Mediterranean heat before. Or as Otabek calls it, _real summer_. It blows. Rome is sticky and crowded and full of extremely loud tourists. The train out into the countryside is a little better, once he gets used to the wind and noise and a dozen different languages washing over him. 

As he starts to cool down and has room to think of anything other than the itchy cling of his shirt to his sweaty back, he tries to remember the last time he’d gone on a vacation--not to a competition or to Hakone to chase Viktor. His grandfather doesn’t like vacations, and he has never traveled with a friend before. He’s never really had a friend like Otabek. 

Their ultimate destination is a small town just north of Rome, where Otabek’s cousin lives. Or possibly his uncle. Yuri had zoned out a little during that conversation--Otabek was talking about museums. That wouldn’t have surprised Yuri even if he hadn’t brought Yuri sightseeing the day they met. Otabek just seems like a museum kind of guy. Even his hair looks smarter than Yuri’s. 

Otabek is reading on his tablet. Yuri leans over to see what it is, but he locks it and slides it into his bag before he gets the chance. 

Too dirty to read in public? Yuri almost asks but doesn’t. 

Yuri wonders if it’s always like this when you spend a great deal of time with someone over a relatively short interval. He feels close to Otabek, but at the same time like he barely knows him at all. He knows exactly how long it takes him to snap when he’s tired, all his expressions when he’s focusing, and that he’ll let a virtual stranger put his fingers in his mouth on international television, but not--for instance--his favorite food. He doesn’t know if he has any siblings. He doesn’t even know his birthday. 

Typically Yuri doesn’t care to learn anything about someone past what he can get from an instagram profile. But that’s the point of this trip--to get to know Otabek and Europe. 

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but the green countryside going by and the sound of the wind don’t leave him with much choice. The next thing he knows Otabek is jostling him awake and the train is still and dark. 

“We’re here.” 

They stumble out onto the platform. Well, Yuri stumbles. Otabek navigates the steps with all the grace you’d expect from an internationally ranked figure skater. Or just a functioning human being. 

The small station building is closed for the night, the ticket window hidden behind blinds. The air smells green and damp, and the puddles in the gravel tell Yuri he’d been asleep long enough to miss the rain. Past the station the world lurks in darkness, but he gets the impression of open space. It makes him feel small and vulnerable, like he had when he and his grandfather used to go walking in the woods. He must just be exhausted. 

They pick up their bags and follow the crowd out to the tiny lot in front of the station. People flit off into the darkness like moths. A man stands at the curb beside a tiny blue Fiat, and at first Yuri thinks he’s just a very optimistic taxi driver. Then he throws his arms around Otabek and kisses him on both cheeks. 

Right. Uncle. 

Yuri checks his phone, which is still on Moscow time. He goes into his settings to change it, and when he looks back up the uncle is right next to him. Yuri is worried he’s going to try to kiss him too, but he just offers him a solemn hand. 

“Nice to meet you.” He says it in English. 

They switch to Kazakh when they get into the car, which is fine with Yuri. He lets it move over him in a wash of nonsense syllables. Otabek’s uncle’s farm is outside of Viterbo proper, along a track of bumpy fields the Fiat can barely handle. It’s dark--darker even than Hakone, and that was really the sticks. 

The car stops at a long, rambling house that seems to go off in way too many directions. Everything smells of flowers and cut grass and ever so slightly of goat. 

They are staying in the guest house, connected to the main house by a path of overgrown heather and trailing veins. Objects loom out of the darkness at Yuri. His jaw cracks on a yawn. He barely remembers getting undressed and into bed; he barely remembers what the room looks like inside. 

In the morning when he slides into wakefulness, it’s to the unfamiliar sensation of sharing a bed. Otabek sleeps as unassumingly as he does everything else--on his back with his arms at his sides, like a king in repose. 

Yuri is blurry with sleep, and he listens to Otabek’s long, slow breaths as the sun creeps in through the blinds. 

Waking up early is not a novelty for Yuri. Most days he beats the sun to the rink; sleeping in is such a rare luxury that even when he has the opportunity his body won’t let him take it. Having absolutely nothing to fill his morning with is a disquieting experience. He locates his shoes, grabs his phone, and goes in search of wifi. 

Morning turns the property into a completely new landscape. The earth is damp and everything is saturated with color; it must have rained during the night. It’s really too small to call it a farm, but it’s not _not_ a farm. There’s a vegetable garden, an enclosure for goats, and an overgrown trellis separating the guesthouse from the main building. 

Yuri is surprised to find a few people already up in the kitchen. An older woman is stirring something fragrant on the stove and two men and a girl maybe a little older than Otabek are drinking coffee at the table. They are looking at a map--a paper map, which Yuri hasn’t seen in years. 

The conversation stalls when he comes in. The woman at the stove says something in Italian. She has a very long ponytail that brushes the small of her back whenever she moves. Her temples are threaded with grey. 

“Sei l’amico di Beka?” she asks Yuri. 

“Uh, I don’t--.” 

One of the men grunts, “Inglese,” and the woman tries again. 

“Are you Beka’s friend?” 

Yuri has to ask her to repeat it before his brain wakes up enough to parse her accent, and for him to realize “Beka” means Otabek. 

“Yeah. I’m, uh, Yuri Plisetsky.” 

Nobody reacts. Which is...awesome, actually. No lie, Yuri loves being famous, but mostly he likes it online where he can just turn off notifications if he needs a break. Makes sense that most folks in rural Italy don’t follow skating, even if their skaters tend to be good. Well, Sara’s good. 

“I am Antonia,” the woman says. “Eric’s wife.” 

Eric--Otabek’s uncle. One of the men slides over on the bench to make room and Antonia pours Yuri a coffee without him asking. She sets it on the table by a little dish of sugar. 

He doesn’t want to sit down and drink coffee with a bunch of strangers. He wants to find the wifi password and check back in with the rest of the world. He doesn’t even really like coffee, especially not without milk. Thankfully, everyone else around the table adds a bunch of sugar to theirs. The girl gives him an encouraging smile. She looks a lot like the woman at the stove. 

“Capelli belli,” she says, and smiles again. 

“She says she likes your hair.” The guy’s English is pretty good. “Are you American?” 

“Russian.” 

“Ah.” His eyes get a little brighter. “I like Russia. Good food. Beautiful women.” 

They go back to their map. Luca--the one who speaks English--translates when he remembers to. The girl’s name is Stefania--Otabek’s cousin. Yuri sits there and plays with his phone, turning it over and over in his lap. Without wifi it is just a useless lump of metal. 

_Shy_ is not a work Yuri would ever use to describe himself. He is forthright to the point that Yakov admonishes him everywhere they go. But the three of them are so loud and comfortable with each other, and none of them have their phones out. Actually, he hasn’t seen a single device since he’s set foot here. 

God, what if they don’t have wifi here? Where the fuck has Otabek brought him? 

He sits back and lets it was over him. Italian is pretty, but he hasn’t heard it enough to be able to pick out individual words. Luca keeps forgetting to translate, which Yuri finds kind of rude, but it’s not like he’s involved in what they’re planning. A hike, maybe? Maybe a bus trip. He doesn’t get how anybody could figure anything out using a paper map. 

Just as he begins to vibrate with caffeine and awkwardness, Otabek arrives in the kitchen and immediately the conversation ends. Luca and Stefania erupt from the table with identical noises of delight, knocking over Yuri’s empty cup. Luca is Stefania’s husband, apparently. The other guy at the table, Pierre, locks eyes with Yuri and they share a brief moment of outsider’s camaraderie. He is a backpacker staying at the Altin family farm for a few weeks as a hired hand. He’s trying to make enough cash for a train ride back to Normandy. Yuri knows, intellectually, that people do this. Spend months, _years_ , doing nothing but traveling the world. Yuri has been to over twenty countries, but he doesn’t do anything there but skate. Every moment of his life has been scheduled for him since he was ten years old. 

Sometimes he wonders what it would be like to just be...normal. If he could just eat and sleep when he wanted, if his actions weren’t constantly parsed by strangers all over the world. If he could live without having to feed every decision through the difference engine of his career. Will this choice help me or hurt me? 

Cheeks are kissed, coffee is poured, and a plate of pastries is set on the table, making it impossible to do more than exchange a glance with Otabek. He gives Yuri a rather harried smile over his aunt’s shoulder. Then another cousin comes in (Stefania’s twin, Yuri discovers later) and the process starts all over again. The Altins remind Yuri of the Katsukis whenever Yuuri comes home. Nobody is ever that happy to see Yuri. Maybe his cat. Or his fan club. But they care about fabulous Yuri Plisetsky from instagram and a thousand fanfics. The Russian Fairy. He doubts any of them would like him after an actual conversation. 

By the time they’ve eaten and escaped into the sunlight it’s mid-morning. Yuri is winded, jittery, and still doesn’t have the wifi password. 

“They’re...pretty friendly.” 

Otabek laughs. He puts a hand on Yuri’s lower back. It’s an unconscious, casual gesture, like he is steadying Yuri for a lift. A strange warmth travels through Yuri and he he doesn’t move. He doesn’t want Otabek to think he is shying from his touch. They stand that way--in an awkward holding pattern. 

Actually, it might not be awkward for Otabek at all. He looks loose. Like he could stand here all day. He probably could. The only crack Yuri has seen in his that solid veneer was during his exhibition skate, when he had stared at Yuri with naked, predatory hunger. And that had been acting. Yuri told him to do it. 

Well, he’d just said _be sexy_. And apparently for Otabek that meant acting like he could tear your throat out. The glove thing had been Otabek’s idea, and Yuri hasn’t been able to forget that slick, fleeting warmth out there on the ice. He doubts he ever will. 

\--

They ride a rickety bus into town, the morning chill burning off by the time they pass under the Fiorentina Arch. The last time Yuri went sightseeing with Otabek it had been the middle of winter, and he only had breath to contemplate the speed of the bike and the warmth of Otabek through his jacket. A crowded bus is a far cry, but he still has the same feeling of displacement--of not knowing what will happen next. 

According to Otabek’s guidebook, Viterbo has a partly intact Medieval wall--one of the largest in Europe. It used to be _the_ largest, before an earthquake a few years ago knocked down a couple miles of it. They stop for lunch at a cafe in a sunny piazza, and Otabek buys them both a weird fizzy orange drink that Yuri can’t decide if he likes. It’s not soda, but it isn’t quite juice either. 

“I haven’t been here in years.” Otabek’s fingers play out an idle rhythm against the stone tabletop. Every so often it will sync up with the rhythm of the fountain in the center of the square. “I used to be small enough to fit in that.” 

Yuri laughs at the image. Little Otabek scrambling over the cobblestones, chased by a herd of concerned adults. 

They spend the day rambling through the town--more stone and vines than he’s ever seen in his life. Narrow streets snake together, connecting piazzas that contain their own fountains or churches or crumbling pillars. Everything here looks at least five hundred years old. 

There are almost as many cafes as there are people. And at least the cafes don’t stare at Yuri like he’s a zoo animal. 

“Why are they all looking at me?” He isn’t dressed ostentatiously, and none of them are looking at Otabek. 

Otabek looks at him too, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other. “Maybe it’s your hair. They don’t get many blonds here.” 

Yuri thinks about Stefania’s comment this morning. “They’ve seen movies, though,” he grumbles. “Can’t they just google some blonds?” 

Whenever the hour turns, the clock towers all chime at once, and some do it on the half-hour too. There are bells in Moscow, but none close enough to the dorm to be a problem. How does anybody get sleep? Maybe the bells stop ringing at night. 

Yuri would have thought wandering around a tiny tourist town would be dull, but it’s not. Half the time in Hakone he was bored out of his mind. But with Otabek he barely feels that instinctive itch to check his phone every thirty seconds. He had gotten on wifi at the cafe and checked his notifications--he isn’t _that_ ready to be that off the grid. He posts a couple of selfies and pictures of the bell towers, and a couple of Otabek drinking that fizzy juice. 

They wait a long time for the bus to bring them back to the farm, and then they wait longer when the bus doesn’t show up and Otabek has to call his uncle for a ride. Usually this sort of flimsy, unstructured day would stress Yuri out. He’s so unused to having nowhere he’s supposed to be. But he likes being here with Otabek, talking about nothing important. Like every other conversation they have it starts with skating and branches out to the stranger tributaries of fashion or movies or their new programs. Okay, that one is also skating, but whatever. 

It’s getting on toward dusk by the time they get back to the farm. The citrusy stink of mosquito candles mingles with the roses. Several uncorked bottles of wine sit on a trestle table beneath an olive tree, shared between everyone from the kitchen this morning, and a few others. Otabek mentioned that the Italian Altins are members of an international organization that allows people to work on farms in return for room and board. Sounds terrible to Yuri, to be honest. 

They greet Otabek like it’s been months since they’ve last seen him instead of hours. And to Yuri’s surprise and slight discomfort, they do the same with him. They pour them both wine and sit Yuri down between the Altin twins, across the table from Otabek. To Yuri’s relief, Stefania has a tablet out and is scrolling through her instagram feed. He gets the wifi password from her-- _unavecchiastrega_ \--and everyone else at the table pulls out their respective devices in the ancient, cross-cultural ritual of exchanging Facebook handles. It feels weird to hand out his fan page, but Yuri is extremely choosy about who he allows to follow his actual profile. 

He instagrams a picture of Otabek holding his glass of wine and immediately gets a string of comments asking where he is, what he’s doing, why he’s with Otabek, etc. A few people want to know if Otabek is old enough to drink. Probably Americans. 

Stefania makes a noise of delight, following up in rapid Italian. Yuri glances at her tablet. She’s on his feed, where he’s posted the pictures from Viterbo that afternoon, and the ones from the day before the trip. There are a lot of pictures of Otabek. And then she scrolls down to the video of the exhibition skate. 

Yuri has the sudden and almost irresistible desire to smack the tablet out of her hand. The wine isn’t helping. 

They’d only had a few days to pull the program together, but it is forever seared into his muscle memory and he knows the exact moment when Otabek will appear. And even if he hadn’t, the collective tipsy gasps, scattered applause, and wolf whistles would do it. 

“Beka, I didn’t know you could be sexy!” Luca exclaims. “Why didn’t you tell us you could be sexy?” 

“You’re the Yuri who won the Grand Prix last year?” An American backpacker leans across the table, nearly upsetting a bottle of wine. “My girlfriend is a big fan.” 

“Yeah, I. Yeah.” 

The candlelight digs deep lines into Otabek’s cheeks and laps a loving touch over his neck and collarbone. His sleeves are rolled to his biceps, the shine of perspiration highlighting the clean lines of muscle. The wine glass hides his smile, but Yuri knows he can tell he is looking at him. And he’s looking back. 

Yuri hasn’t showered today and his hair is pulled back into a sweaty clump at the base of his neck. The knees of his jeans are dirty from this morning when he’d fallen trying to get a good angle on a fountain. Usually it would bother him, but being here feels like being a thousand miles away from himself. 

The conversation swerves away from skating and on to the health of the goats and the vegetable garden. They are having trouble with beetles this summer. Yuri can’t follow it all. Most of the assembled speak English, but they will occasionally swerve into Italian or Kazakh, and French once or twice. Yuri wonders if anybody speaks Russian. 

Once again, he feels like he should be bored. Hanging around talking has never been his idea of a good time, especially not with total strangers. But sitting here with the wind lifting the sweaty hair off the nape of his neck, he is surprisingly content. Maybe it’s the wine, or the knowledge that he has a string of uninterrupted vacation days. Or that when he looks across the table at Otabek, something hot and strange flares up in his stomach. He has to take a break from everything every so often and look at his phone. 

More bottles of wine are broken out, and eventually Aunt Antonia and a couple others vanish inside and return with dinner. Otabek starts telling Stefania and Luca the story of how the two of them met. 

“I thought you met when you were kids,” Luca says. “You sure talked about him enough.” 

Yuri is pretty sure he imagines the flare of panic in Otabek’s eyes, but he savors it anyway. “Well, I knew him. I don’t think he ever noticed me.” He gives Yuri a sly glimpse over his glass. 

“It was a dance class. I was dancing.” Yuri tries and fails to hold his scowl. “And I was 9.” 

“Well, I was 12. And surprised.” 

Surprised, Yuri wants to say. Surprised by what? 

Otabek keeps going. He’s talking so much more than he ever does to anyone, including Yuri. He tells the part where he comes across Yuri on the run from his fanclub. He talks about sightseeing and the dinner interrupted by Yuuri’s and Viktor’s ostentatious announcement. He leaves some stuff out. The stuff Yuri is going to remember until the day he dies. 

“Yuri Plisetsky. You had the eyes of a soldier.” 

That pulsed through the core of him, ringing out like a struck bell. No one had ever said anything like that to him before or since. 

As the night grows deeper and the garden gets darker, people start slipping more and more into their native languages. It’s irritating. Yuri doesn’t speak a damn word of Italian beyond names of food. That was something he liked about the Katsukis—if there was anyone at all there who didn’t speak Japanese, they would speak English. They found it profoundly rude to do anything else. 

Eventually Yuri returns to the guesthouse to charge his phone. A shimmering fuzziness holds him up, but he isn’t quite drunk. He trails his fingers across the vines on the trellis. Every so often a thorn will catch the soft pad of his thumb, but he doesn’t stop. 

He feels unsteady, and not just because of the wine. Shaken up, like he’s told something he shouldn’t have, except it hadn’t been him speaking. It’s not a secret, really. He and Otabek’s meeting. Nothing weird or scandalous had happened. It’s common for rival skaters to spend time together at competitions. Professional skaters have a very finite list of people they can relate to. The list of people Yuri actually wants to spend time with is even shorter. 

Yuri plugs his phone in beside the nightstand. The bed is neatly made because Otabek took the time to make it this morning before finding Yuri in the kitchen. His stuff is neatly stacked against the wall, while Yuri’s is a small explosion in one corner. The lights from the garden look far off and misting in the dark. Yuri doesn’t turn on the lamp. It feels like any change in state will break this fragile place of suspended animation. 

“Hey, are you okay?” 

He startles and smacks his knuckles against the nightstand. Otabek stands framed in the doorway. Yuri feels caught out, although all he’d been doing was standing there. 

“I’m fine.” 

“I thought maybe you were sick.” 

Yuri picks his phone back up. “It takes more than two glasses of wine to make me sick.” 

Otabek doesn’t say anything but Yuri can practically hear his eyebrows go up. 

“Maybe two and a half.” 

Otabek laughs. “I’m glad you came with me." He takes a step into the room, hesitant. like it doesn’t belong to him too. “They all love you.” 

Yuri snorts, before he gets that it hadn’t been a joke. “They just met me.” 

“Love at first sight, I guess,” Otabek says softly, and Yuri realizes he has had just as much to drink. He feels that little magnetic tug between them, the rising burn that filled him when he’d stepped off the ice back in Barcelona. He saw it echoed in Otabek’s eyes then—now it’s too dark to see, but he knows it’s there. Back then they’d had too much to do—post-skate interviews and getting berated by Yakov for changing the program at the last moment.

“I should have known Luca would bring that up.” 

“Bring what up?” 

“The fact that for about two weeks you were the only thing I talked about.” 

That hits Yuri like a physical blow. Otabek steps inside the room, touching Yuri’s chin with the tips of his fingers. He feels the hard zip of electricity, a shimmery static that won’t let him go. 

“I’m drunk,” Otabek says. 

Yuri says, “So am I,” even though he’d just claimed the opposite. The words just slip out. “Your hands are warm.” That slips out too. 

Otabek cups his jaw. Yuri doesn’t know who leans into who, only that Otabek’s mouth is even warmer than his hands, and it tastes like wine. Yuri wonders what his fingers taste like. His must have tasted like leather out there on the ice. 

In movies, music always swells while people kiss. Or the screen fades to black to preserve the rating, depending on what happens next. The room is impossibly quiet and soft, apart from the slow shift of the wind outside the tiny windows and occasional swell of conversation. 

Everything in Yuri goes lax. That doesn’t ever happen anymore. It’s hard to know from moment to moment, exactly what Yuri wants for himself. Otabek tips Yuri’s face with his fingers, adjusting the angle for the next collision of their mouths. If he hadn’t been slightly drunk, he knows he’d have far more to worry about; is he doing this right, does he taste like lamb and rosemary? Is he breathing weirdly into Otabek’s mouth? Otabek pulls away, their lips making a soft noise of suction. 

“We should probably get back,” Otabek says. “They’ll start thinking we’re—well, that we’re doing exactly what we’re doing.” 

Yuri grabs tight on Otabek’s wrist as he pulls away. “Is this what you followed me for?” 

Otabek sways for a moment, untethered. “Which time?” He closes his eyes. “I never know what I’m doing when it comes to you.” 

That doesn’t mean anything, but it sounds great to Yuri’s tipsy brain. 

Tomorrow nothing sounds good to his brain, and nothing looks good either, especially not bright light. 

They both sleep late, and that seems to be the only remedy Otabek needs—he’s up and ready for sightseeing after just a couple shots of espresso. Yuri doesn’t complain, because he is trying to pretend he is not as hungover as he is, and because he wants to figure out if what happened last night—the touch of a mouth that lit him up from the inside out—had been something more than an alcohol fueled fantasy. And he needs to be near Otabek to figure that out. 

There’s some old Etruscan ruins a few miles outside of Viterbo that Otabek wants to check out, so they ride the bus together into a town even smaller than the one they’re staying in. They aren’t very much to look at--just more tumbled rocks in a country full of tumbled rocks. 

By noon it’s warm enough that most of the tourists retreat off the hill and down to the colorful umbrellas outside a hotel bar in the piazza. Only Yuri, Otabek, and a family of three remain--a man and a woman and a chubby, wandering toddler. Yuri is slightly surprised to hear her calling to her mother in garbled but fully comprehensible Russian. 

“What do you think?” It takes Yuri a moment to realize Otabek means the ruins. 

“They look...pretty old.” Yuri isn’t sure how you judge the quality of ruins. How big they are? How pretty? They don’t really seem to be good for much besides attracting graffiti artists. 

Otabek can’t quite swallow his smile. He cups the back of Yuri’s neck, casual and affectionate. Then he walks back over to examine a column. Yuri’s heart smacks up into his throat. He thought Otabek was going to kiss him, here, in front of all these people. He’s relieved he hadn’t tried, but he is also indescribably let down. 

The Russian couple stands in front of a partially-intact fresco, the man posing while his wife takes a picture. Neither of them are watching the little girl, who is tottering toward a drop-off on one side of the hill. A drop like that might give Yuri a bruise, or a twisted ankle at the very worst. He has not idea what it’d do to a kid. Aren’t their bones made of mush, or whatever? 

Yuri cries out wordlessly, which just makes the couple look at him. Otabek yells too, but much more effectively. “Your child is going to fall!” 

The parents jump. The wife drops her phone on the rocks and bounds the few steps to her daughter, scooping her up under the armpits. The kid starts crying, probably more out of shock than pain. Yuri watches, struck silent as the man scolds her for wandering off, even as he thanks Otabek. Profusely. In Russian. To which Otabek responds, fluently and flawlessly. 

Yuri doesn’t say anything at all as Otabek says goodbye to the family and trudges back to him. He doesn’t say anything as Otabek touches his shoulder and says, “Close one, right?” It’s in English, and so is his suggestion that they go down to the hotel bar for a drink. And the “we’ll talk about it later”. That’s also in English. 

Yuri feels the entire world flip over onto its side.

“How--what--you speak Russian?” 

Otabek shrugs. “Everyone in Kazakhstan speaks Russian, Yuri. I figured you knew that.” 

“What?” Now it sounds like Otabek has picked up a new language--one Yuri has never heard before. “Then why...I don’t--.” 

“I prefer English.” 

“What, why?” 

Otabek finally turns around. He looks exasperated, or maybe like he’s trying not to laugh. Yuri doesn’t know which would be more infuriating. “It’s the lingua franca, right? It would be rude to speak Russian in front of everyone else.” 

“Yuuri and Viktor speak Japanese all the time!” 

“That’s because Viktor is trying to learn. We already both speak Russian.” 

“So what, you’re speaking to me in English for my own fucking good?” 

“Yuri--.” 

“Everyone at Eric’s house speaks Italian in front of us!” 

“Can we please--.” Otabek glances over his shoulder, like Yuri is embarrassing him. Good. “Can we please just talk about this later?” 

Yuri’s head throbs and the sunlight beats down on the back of his neck. Otabek’s face goes glittery-bright and the ruins sway. Oh no. No. Absolutely not. He is not about to faint like some overcome heroine who has just gone into shock. 

“Yuri--.” 

Yuri steps back out of his grip. “I’m fine.” 

“You’re dehydrated.” 

“I said, I’m fine.” 

Otabek sighs. “Come on, you’re being ridiculous.” 

Yuri spins and stalks away. 

“Where are you going?” 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

“You’re going to get lose--you don’t speak Italian!” 

“Go fuck yourself!” Yuri shouts back in Russian. 

He’s a few streets away when he realizes he has to accept the fact that he is dehydrated and hungover and if he keeps running around in the heat he is going to pass out. He stops at a bodega and buys a bottle of water. He upends half of it over his head and drinks the rest. Then he sits down on a bench and waits. 

Like hell he’s gonna slink back to Otabek like a kid who’s just had a tantrum. But if Otabek comes to find him, well. That’s not Yuri’s fault. 

The sun reaches its zenith and then starts its slow journey back down, and the only thing that comes down the alley are the lengthening shadows of the buildings. Yuri just sits there getting angrier until he can’t keep still anymore. There isn’t much town here, so he ends up walking in circles around a few blocks, always ending up back in the same damn piazza with the same damn fountain. Its statue looks like a melted dolphin. 

God, this is so stupid. He doesn’t even know enough Italian to figure out when the next bus back to Viterbo is. 

When he calms down a little Yuri tries to work out exactly why he is so mad. He’s just so spun. Discovering that someone speaks a language is like...discovering they have a secret wife or internet career. It’s a whole section of Otabek’s life that Yuri just...didn’t know about. He’s been so open with Otabek; he’s told him things he’s never told anyone else. He just figured that was true for Otabek, too. 

Stupid. He’s just some silly kid to Otabek. Too young to even get into Barcelona nightclubs. 

Who does Otabek think he is? Yuri is a champion. The youngest ever winner of the Grand Prix. If anyone doesn’t have time, it’s him. 

Yuri stomps down a wide, shop-lined avenue crowded with people out for a pre-dinner walk. He realizes he is having a made-up argument with Otabek in his head, and that is ridiculous. But he feels like being ridiculous right now. 

It’s not like he could really have a good argument with him, anyway. Yuri’s English is good, but it’s not perfect. It’s difficult to keep his thoughts organized in it. If he could have the conversation in Russian, well, they wouldn’t even have this issue, would they? Then Otabek wouldn’t have been lying to him for months. 

Seriously. What the fuck. 

As it gets darker Yuri starts to experience ripples of--well, not panic. Being lost is not enough to make him panic--he isn’t a little kid. But he’s definitely uneasy. He goes into one of the many cafes that line the road, orders a drink with a side of wifi password, and as seen as he connects he finds he has a message and a missed call. Neither of them are from Otabek. He pretends that it doesn’t bother him.

The voicemail is spam, the text is from Viktor. Otabek rolls his eyes at all the emojis. 

He starts to respond in text, then decides that isn’t fast enough. He holds nothing but derision for people who talk on the phone in public, but his give-a-fuck is currently extremely low. Besides, nobody here can understand Russian, and if they can they’ll just pretend they can’t, because apparently that’s the thing to do. 

Viktor picks up right away, beaming. He looks a little tipsy. “Yurachka! How’s Italy?” 

Yuri blows past pleasantries because he doesn’t have time for bullshit. His phone is at 40% battery. “Did you know Otabek speaks Russian?” 

Viktor spends a couple seconds blinking. He rubs at his forehead. “Um, what?” 

“Russian. Otabek speaks it.” 

“I guess that makes sense? He’s from Almaty, isn’t he? Most Kazakhs are bilingual.” 

“How the fuck was I supposed to know that? He won’t speak it, even though it makes way more sense because it’s our first language! And we had a fight, and I’m not even sure what it was about...just...” He grinds the heel of his hand against his temple. “Shit. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.” 

Viktor navigates that one patiently. “Don’t you know any Kazakh history? Wait, forget I bothered to ask that.” 

“I’m not stupid.” It comes out defensive and petulant. But Viktor is one of the few people who will take him seriously no matter what he sounds like. 

“I know you aren’t. Just--you might not know the whole story. The...context, or whatever. I didn’t know anything about Japan beyond samurai movies until I started dating Yuuri.” 

“Otabek and I aren’t--.” He takes a drink instead of continuing on that train of thought. He has no idea where it will terminate. 

Viktor doesn’t comment; he knows Yuri would hang up on him if he did. “Just--go easy on each other, okay? This kind of situation can be hard to navigate. But it’s worth it, believe me.” 

-

With the remaining charge on his phone, Yuri does some googling. He only has the chance to read a couple of wiki articles, but it’s enough to give him an idea. He’s...a little sheepish, but also a little more annoyed, because if Otabek had only explained to him that it was political thing he...well, he probably would have still stormed off but he might have gone back faster.

He has the presence of mind to write down Otabek’s number before his phone powers itself off, and he attempts to ask the barista to use someone’s phone through body language before realizing that her English is better than his. She lets him use the cafe phone. 

Otabek picks up on the first ring, although he doesn’t sound angry or worried. He doesn’t sound anything. Shame and spite war inside Yuri as he describes to Otabek where he is. 

He expects him to send a cab or for Eric’s tiny Fiat to lumber down the cobblestone avenue, but instead he hears the _vrooom_ of an approaching bike. A thin headlight slices through the summer evening. Otabek pulls up and smiles at him. Yuri’s stomach does something complicated and buoyant. 

_Come to sweep me off my feet again?_ That’s what Viktor would say. Yuri just climbs on behind him. 

The sun sinks beneath the broken teeth of the crenellated skyline, but the air is still warm. Summer wind lifts his hair off the back of his neck. The ride through Barcelona was in the dead of winter, but he’d had the same tightness in his chest, the same trembling sense of the unknown. He succumbs to instinct and buries his face in Otabek’s shoulder. He’s tired of being angry. It’s weird how he can exist in a permanent state of alienation with the rest of the world, but one afternoon of resenting Otabek and he’s exhausted. 

When Otabek turns off the road before they reach the farm, Yuri doesn’t protest. Wherever Otabek is taking him there will be a good reason for it. He trusts him more than he trusts anyone. Maybe that’s stupid, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The path up the hill is steep and he has to wrap his arms around Otabek’s waist and brace with his abs in order to keep from sliding off. He feels the vespa’s engine churning to handle the slope. 

“The view is worth it,” Otabek says, possibly trying to reassure the bike more than Yuri. 

He’s right. Viterbo spreads out in concentric circles of light and shadow. The ruined forum, the vineyards and restaurants, and the traffic jam in the square. Yuri takes a moment to take it all in, before realizing he still has his arms wrapped around Otabek. 

The grass is high and itchy, but Yuri doesn’t hesitate to follow Otabek to the ground. They lie without touching, although all it would take is a twitch of movement to bring their arms together. 

Otabek’s hair is in his eyes. He hasn’t bothered to style it for the past few days, and it makes him look younger. “I wanted to explain,” he says without preamble. “I didn’t mean to upset you, or make you feel like--.” 

_You don’t have to apologize_ , is what Yuri should say. Or _I understand, I overreacted_. Possibly he should just kiss him and kick the problem down the road a few hundred meters. 

Instead he opens his mouth and what comes out is, “Do you hate that I’m Russian?” 

Otabek’s brows jab upward. “What--?” 

“I just mean--I read some stuff online. Not a lot, but--.” He closes his eyes, dazed by what a mess he is. “I’m just wondering if, like..you’d like me better if I wasn’t Russian.” God, that was worse. 

Otabek’s eyes go very round. He slaps at his cheek, displacing a mosquito. 

“Yuri. If...I liked you more than I already do, I think it would be a problem.” 

“Huh?” 

“Well, I definitely wouldn’t be able to share a bed with you without going absolutely insane.” 

Yuri flushes, breaths going shallow at the thought that he might be as distracting to Otabek as Otabek is to him. Yuri knows he’s attractive. He has thousands of people online shouting at him about it, and other people shouting at those people to stop. People tell him his selfies are too sexy for his age, and that he shouldn’t be using sex to sell his brand. He doesn’t care about any of that. But with Otabek...it’s different. It just doesn’t feel like enough. Otabek somehow looks beyond his looks and the medals, searching for anything worthwhile underneath. And that is where Yuri is afraid of falling short. 

Otabek’s mosquito lands on Yuri’s hand, biting before he can shake it off. It hurts. 

“Can we just...I don’t really know how to explain it. I don’t resent you being Russian. Or--I try not to.” He gives Yuri a swift look, like he regrets being honest. The knot in Yuri’s stomach cinches tighter. “It’s hard to explain how I feel about it--or, or how my parents do. You aren’t any more in control of where you come from than I am, and I...I don’t know. It kind of felt like if we could just speak English, we could keep all that shit out. That...other shit that doesn’t have anything to do with us, or skating. It’s just brutal, unchangeable history. 

“I get why you’re angry at me for hiding it from you, but...it’s kind of not about you. Agh.” He scratches at the bite on his cheek. “Sorry, that sounds worse out loud.” 

“No, it’s okay,” Yuri answers before stopping to think about whether it’s true. He doesn’t know if it’s okay, but he does know he won’t let that keep the two of them apart. The broader world has never held much interest for him before. Other countries were just places he could go to win competitions. He had never really needed to bother with wondering about the perspectives of other people. Viktor would call him self-centered. Yuuri might give him one of those infuriatingly superior smiles and call him “young”. But what the hell does he know? 

Otabek is still talking. “Speaking to you in English is kind of…” 

“Kind of..?” 

Otabek finally looks at him, and it’s a different look than he’s used to. “I like English being the language I use to talk to you in. I mean...it’s not our secret language, I talk to everyone at work in English too. Just...the Otabek Altin you know is the one who speaks English. The Otabek that speaks Russian is someone different.” 

“Huh?” 

Otabek shrugs. “You don’t feel different in different languages?” 

“I guess.” He does speak very differently to Viktor and the rest of his team than he does with other people, but he always figured that was because of how well he knows them. He never factored in the language barrier as a, well...barrier, against actually knowing someone well. But he does form thoughts differently in Russian than in English, and he doesn’t think it’s just because he knows Russian better.

“Can we go to Kazakhstan?” 

Otabek’s eyes dart to different points on Yuri’s face like he’s trying to make out some kind of code. “Don’t you want to go to Greece?” That was next on their itinerary. 

“No, I do.” The pictures of the beaches had looked nice, anyway. “But Greece will always be there.” 

“So will Kazakhstan.”

“Right, but…” Yuri fumes. He’s trying to do something here. Otabek is making it hard by not just plucking it from thin air. “Like--you’ve been to Russia.” 

“Only Moscow. Russia’s a big place.” 

“I know! Stop arguing! I just--I kind of just want to see where you come from.” Maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe that’s weird. “Would your family...not like me?” 

Otabek shifts in the grass. Overhead the clouds tumble over each other, gilded with moonlight. “My family wants me to be happy.” 

The non-answer chafes, but the implication makes his ears burn. He makes Otabek happy. “Is Almaty nice?” God, what is wrong with his brain? 

“It’s beautiful,” Otabek says. “I’d like to show it to you.” 

The wind soothes the little pinpricks of heat on Yuri’s face. He wonders if it would be okay to kiss Otabek now. Then he stops wondering and just does it.

**Author's Note:**

> i was going to do a deeper dive into the actual political situation in post-soviet europe, but it came out very preachy and expositiony. I'm more interested in the humanity of the situation than the history.


End file.
